Daily Picks: Week Two

Welcome to week two of our 2015 Seminar! Hopefully you all had a restorative weekend and are ready to dive back into the archive.

June 8, 2015

Our research teams from Kenyon College and the College of Wooster have been hard at work in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s reading room.

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Patrick shared the following from an 1822 address by Nicholas Biddle:

Who is there even on this side of the Atlantic, who does not read with more pleasure the accounts of the agricultural meetings at Holkham, than of coronation at Westminster, or the assemblage of sovereigns at Troppau? Who did not feel more satisfaction at the exhibitions of Massachusetts or Maryland, than in the gaudiest displays of military power?

“May we all be as excited for agriculture as Nicholas Biddle was in 1822,” observes Patrick in his email.

June 9, 2015

While the BSS has five official partner institutions — the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Center for the History of Medicine (Countway Library), Houghton Library, Northeastern University Archives & Special Collections, and the Schlesinger Library — participants are welcome to branch out to other locations in the Boston area as their research demands. Julia Randel and Genevieve Janvrin (Hope College) spent some time at the Boston Public Library.

In the evening, we hosted the energetic writer John Stauffer (Harvard University) who spoke at length about the craft of historical storytelling.

Stauffer: "History is first and foremost a story. So how do you write a story?" #bss15#stauffer

June 11, 2015

Today was a big day for BSS, as we had the Massachusetts Historical Society’s annual Strawberry Festival, a visit from the GLCA Director of Program Development, Greg Wegner, and an evening presentation by Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters (2005) and Margaret Fuller (2013).

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After Marshall’s talk, we gathered around some primary source materials that she used in piecing together the lives of the Peabody sisters.

June 12, 2015

Today, BSS students got a tour of the Houghton Library from Administrative Officer Dennis Marnon.

We were introduced to the history of Houghton Library, shown the Samuel Johnson collection, Emily Dickinson collection, and John Keats collection. We also got a chance to look at their current exhibit on Alice in Wonderland before the formal tour began.